Reviews for History of the Jews

The average rating for History of the Jews based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-11-17 00:00:00 Luis Mondragon This review is dedicated to the Jewish Nation, reborn as a sovereign people, in the Land of Israel. In this work Johnson undertakes a comprehensive study of the Jewish people (from the route word Yehudi, meaning people of Yehudah (Judea), popularly referred to today as the West Bank, the ancient cradle of the Jewish people. He begins the book by referring to the town of Hebron, where the founder of the Hebrew Nation is buried with his wife Sarah. Johnson refers to the previous occupiers of Hebron, such as the Canaanites, Edomites, Hellenes, Romans, Byzantines and Ottomans, which have all disappeared from this land, and compares this to the fact that the Jews are still there. Indeed there is a flourishing Jewish community in Hebron. Reading this (the book was written in 1987), one is struck by the tragic irony, and a sense of extreme injustice, that so much of the world establishment, is demonizing the Jewish community of Hebron (75% of which are women and children), as well as all other Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, for the crime of living in their ancient homeland. This despite the fact that the Jews where living in the area, over 2 400 years before the first Arabs arrived. Johnson presents conclusive and indisputable evidence from ancient documentation, archaeology and other sciences, that there has been a constant Jewish presence in the Land of Israel, for 3 900 years. Johnson is writing as a British Catholic historian, with no brief for the Zionist cause, but is fair-minded unlike the Palestinianist Goebbels'ses such as Noam Chomsky. Edward Said, and Norman Finkelstein, who subvert history to deny the Jews the write to live in the ancient homeland. Johnson details the contributions of the Jews to the world and the Jewish people, and the experiences of and persecutions of the Jews in 7 parts. Against this backdrop we read of the experiences of those great Jews who have made incredible contributions to the world such as Moses, King David, King Solomon, Elijah, Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Rabbi Akiva, Maimonides, Judah haLevi, Manasseh ben Israel, Baal Shem Tov, the Vilna Gaon, the Rothschilds, Disraeli, Samson Raphael Hirsch, Emma Lazarus, Luzatto and Sir Moses Montefiore, as well as the founders of the modern Zionist movement, the ingathering of the Jews to their ancient homeland: Rabbi Zevi Hirsch Kalischer , Rabbi Judah Alkalai , Moses Hess , Leon Pinsker , Theodore Herzl , Chaim Weizmann , Vladimir Jabotinsky , David Ben Gurion and Menachem Begin. We also learn of the damage done to Jews and the world by the charlatans and anti-Jewish Jews like Pablo of Burgos, Shabattai Zevi, Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxembourg, and Isaac Babel. He points out how Jewish Communists Always renounced their Judaism, which indeed shows how ridiculous it is for some anti-Semites of the right to blame the Jewish people as whole for Communist destruction and terror. Karl Marx was one of the greatest self-hating Jews in history, whose works are filled with the most vicious and blatant anti-Semitism. It is not therefore surprising that he spawned one of the cruellest, most destructive and murderous ideologies ever. Communism has been responsible for over 100 million deaths and the destruction of countless lives. Today the Marxist world has adopted the vilification and planned destruction of Israel, as their primary cause, to add to their long list of cruelties (With G-D's help we will not let them succeed). Especially on university campuses around the world the disciples of Marx (many of them 'Jewish') are engaging in this cruel campaign against Israel. Johnson details the persecution of the Jews in Europe, and also talks of their brutal persecution by Moslems in the Middle East, and we see that the idea that the Arabists have inculcated in the minds of many, that Jews where well treated under Moslem rule, is a grotesque untruth. Unfortunately European historians on Jewish history, both Jew and Gentile, have tended to paint the story of the Jews in Arab countries as an idyllic existence, while in fact they lived under conditions of extreme inequality and persecution, often being subjected to massive and vicious pogroms by their Arab neighbours and overlords, sometimes greater and more genocidal, than the pogroms of Europe, with the obvious exception of Hitler's holocaust. The book does however have some flaws. Unfortunately, in the chapter about how the Jewish self-determination was crushed, after the destruction by the Romans of the Temple and Jerusalem, he does not recount how the Roman Emperor Hadrian named Israel 'Palestine' in order to cut us off from our land and heritage. Now those cruel ones who again wish to cut us off from our land and heritage, once again refer to Israel as 'Palestine'. The spirit of the Roman Empire lives on in the UN, university campuses and leftist academics around the world, the Arabs, China, the EU and Third World governments etc-all of whom wish to obliterate the name of Israel, and so refer to Eretz Yisrael as the hideous abomination-'Palestine'. In the name of 'Palestine' Jewish men, women and children are being murdered, as so many times before in history. While the term 'Palestinian' and 'Palestine' has only been used exclusively to refer to the Arabs who claim ownership of the Land of Israel-after 1967, it is unfortunate that the name had been used by historians so often as the name 'Palestine' is a colonial creation, and to use it to refer to Israel prior to the naming of this land as 'Palestine' is simply superfluous-it should never be recognized as a legitimate name for Israel and Judea, at any time.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-11-03 00:00:00 Thor Heimdahl I'm not really reviewing this book, I'm explaining why I abandoned it pretty early on. This book is not for me, and personally I feel it shouldn't be for anyone, but you can draw your own conclusions. I abandoned this book when it became excruciatingly obvious that Johnson was cherry-picking historical arguments to find archaeological and historiographical support for Biblical events, and reducing more than a century of criticisms of this approach to Biblical archaeology to straw man caricatures. I honestly did not know there are still historians working today who regard the Flood Tablet of the Gilgamesh epic as evidence for a historical flood. Johnson raises and then ignores the compelling archaeological counter-evidence - that major floods in Mesopotamia occurred at different times in different places. But he does not consider the equally important comparative counter-evidence - that the motif of a civilization-ending flood sent by the gods to purge a bungled humanity is a wide-spread motif, found not just among the Sumerians, Akkadians, and Jews, but the Mayans. If he had at least suggested that he was aware of problems such as this instead of relentlessly ignoring them, I would have no objection, but as it is, his fundamental posture shows itself through this and many more examples to be studiously anti-empirical and theoretically anachronistic. His analysis of Mesopotamian precursors to Moses show similar staggering weaknesses of omission. I abandoned the book when he considered the historical evidence for Abraham having actually come from Ur, without pausing to even consider the question of whether or not there was in fact such a historical personage. No one who is not already powerfully sympathetic to the historicity of Biblical events, or unaware of the last century of scholarship in this arena, could find this book persuasive. We would not entertain an astronomy book that spoke from a geocentric paradigm; neither should we accept an engagement of Biblical archaeology that ignores what we know of folklore, depth psychology, comparative religions, anthropology, and archaeology, except insofar as they lend support to its conclusions.